Maja and Patrick are attending the Online Educa Berlin Conference. One highlight today was the workshop, Knowledge Exchange on Technology for Education. In one breakout session, participants from throughout Europe and outside, from both university and corporate environments, discussed their experiences and challenges with implementing effective blended learning solutions. Sound familiar? Things we raised as common concerns included:
* Addressing the cultural change in the organizations (for both teachers and participants)
* Choosing technologies and tools
* Finding guidelines for designs for how to blend the modes
* Fighting perceptions that online learning is cheaper
* Fighting perceptions that only the content format needs to change
* Ensuring quality in the online and classroom phases
* Ensuring and measuring impacts
In another breakout session on creating Flexible Learning Environments for students (for example mobile), most of the same issues were raised, but additional ones included:
* Technical challenges, of creating useful mobile apps, for example
* Cultural challenges with the introduction of ubiquitous learning (and teaching!) opportunities
* Deciding how to use the extra context-of-use data that are generated (e.g., how to customize for a 2-hour train trip one learner needs to take, versus a 15-minute bus ride)
* Dealing with assessment and the potential need for peer/teacher interaction and feedback in a completely self-paced learning experience
Finally, we attended a session with Stephen Downes on developing personal learning environments (PLEs). In this approach, each learner is given the opportunity to collect data on learning resources used and activities engaged in (wherever they occur), as well as professional accomplishments, and to share data about these and the badges and certificates collected along the way. In addition, PLE's include ways for receiving recommendations for courses, resources, and learning paths, and ways to interact with other learners, content, and experts in your areas of your interest. You can think of it as having personal campus in the cloud that you define based on your needs and interests, a personal database of all things you do to learn and demonstrate your developing skills, and a way of sharing this to the level you want and need to with credit providers, employers, and anyone else who might need this information, including yourself. Workshop attendees worked to define the necessary capabilities of a PLE system, and prioritized the development phases.
Maja Kuna (EUMETSAT) & Patrick Parrish (WMO)
* Addressing the cultural change in the organizations (for both teachers and participants)
* Choosing technologies and tools
* Finding guidelines for designs for how to blend the modes
* Fighting perceptions that online learning is cheaper
* Fighting perceptions that only the content format needs to change
* Ensuring quality in the online and classroom phases
* Ensuring and measuring impacts
In another breakout session on creating Flexible Learning Environments for students (for example mobile), most of the same issues were raised, but additional ones included:
* Technical challenges, of creating useful mobile apps, for example
* Cultural challenges with the introduction of ubiquitous learning (and teaching!) opportunities
* Deciding how to use the extra context-of-use data that are generated (e.g., how to customize for a 2-hour train trip one learner needs to take, versus a 15-minute bus ride)
* Dealing with assessment and the potential need for peer/teacher interaction and feedback in a completely self-paced learning experience
Finally, we attended a session with Stephen Downes on developing personal learning environments (PLEs). In this approach, each learner is given the opportunity to collect data on learning resources used and activities engaged in (wherever they occur), as well as professional accomplishments, and to share data about these and the badges and certificates collected along the way. In addition, PLE's include ways for receiving recommendations for courses, resources, and learning paths, and ways to interact with other learners, content, and experts in your areas of your interest. You can think of it as having personal campus in the cloud that you define based on your needs and interests, a personal database of all things you do to learn and demonstrate your developing skills, and a way of sharing this to the level you want and need to with credit providers, employers, and anyone else who might need this information, including yourself. Workshop attendees worked to define the necessary capabilities of a PLE system, and prioritized the development phases.
Maja Kuna (EUMETSAT) & Patrick Parrish (WMO)
